It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.
“Retaining the best workers is especially crucial in an area like photolithography, where a huge amount of tacit knowledge is used to assemble its machines. An ASML engineer once told He Rongming, the founder of Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, one of China’s top ASML competitors, that the company wouldn’t be able to replicate ASML’s products even if it had the blueprints. He suggested that ASML’s products reflected ‘decades, if not centuries’ of knowledge and experience. ASML’s Chinese competitors have systematically attempted to hire former ASML engineers, and there is at least one documented case of a former ASML employee unlawfully handing over proprietary information. But none of this appears to have narrowed the gap.”
Non-zero chances - yes. Unavoidable - I wouldn't be so sure. I can't imagine how many top human-hours and cutting-edge inventions involved to construct this machine. And much of this simply cannot be stolen or bought, no matter how much money you have.
It has never happened in the history of the world that a company or country could maintain its technological advance indefinitely.
Either China will catch up on this or that particular technology will become obsolete. But it is certain that they won't stay behind forever (measured in a small number of decades at most).
There is no doubt that less than 10 years will be needed for China to be able to do something equivalent to what the ASML machines can do now.
What is far less certain is what ASML will be able to do at that time, i.e. if they will be able to progress significantly over the state-of-the-art of today, or they will reach a plateau.
Besides China, there is a renewed effort in Japan to become competitive again, so ASML may face in the future both Chinese and Japanese competitors.
This is kind of like saying you can prove everyone dies based on the evidence that everyone who is not currently alive has died.
You might place an upper limit using history but in this case I'd guess that limit would end up being much larger than the present semiconductor industry itself might last.
I'd say it is more likely than within 20 years the domestic Chinese semiconductor industry will be state-of-the-art across the full vertical and horizontal range.
There is a level of arrogance in the West that China does cheap but simple/low quality whereas this is only a stepping stone along the way. German car manufacturers went into China during the 90s with that mindset, and expecting it was forever, well they don't think that anymore...
I mean you’ve definitely just had technology disappear though, usually because of war. Damascus Steel was a lost military tech. We could certainly end up just accidentally (or worse, intentionally) bomb this stuff out of existence so nobody has it.
One can ballpark it, during EUV commercialization, ASML had 15k employees, Zeiss 3k, Cymer 1k. 20 years of non priority commercial development, lots of setbacks. Final integration ~5k suppliers. For reference commercial aviation Boeing/Airbus with as 100k employees, 50k suppliers. And we don't even know it's correct technical roadmap. Initially they thought synchrotron better than plasma/LPP but went with latter because synchrotron too expensive, now EUV machine prices ballooned to multiple synchrotron price. Don't be surprise if we find it dead end non competitive tech in 5-10 years if PRC or JP figures out SSMB/FEL etc, LPP may become economically uncompetitive and all ASML EUV becomes stranded assets. This real possibly because while ASML LPP works, it works at far higher cost than original projections, i.e. it's overbudget techstack with lethal scaling costs.
On paper EUV relatively modest undertaking vs commercial aviation, EUV deeper integration vs commercial aviation breadth, but in terms of scale of effort for nation state coordination, EUV probably all things considered, easier to replicate because it has no regulatory slowdown, it's purely host country physics problem. Having enough talent and throwing it at problem x espionage x poaching talent x time will likely solve precision physics problem sooner than later. Vs commercial aviation which has complicated geopolitical/regulatory hurdles and magnitude more suppliers and scale. TLDR EUV has smaller organizational surface area for determined state to pursue through concentrating $$$, talent and effort. You can buy a ex ASML to bootstrap EUV development, much harder to get globe to buy COMAC without decades of airworthiness. There's a reason western analysts predict PRC EUV in 2030s (meanwhile PRC already beat prototype estimate timeline), but probably not realistic for global COMAC in same timeframe, and PRC been hammering at commercial aviation seriously long before EUV.
That's the key - if it was done once, it can be done again, and likely it's going to be significantly cheaper/easier because it's known it can be done. We see this from olympic records (e.g., the 4 minute mile was a "barrier" until one day it was passed and suddenly a bunch of people passed it).
Of course, doing it "legally" is another question - someone in the US trying to replicate would likely run into patent and other issues.
But a top-secret Manhattan-style project done by the US or China? definitely doable, and if you add spy-shit in, perhaps even faster.
i find it hard to believe that there is no equivalent anywhere else in the world. there is so much talent out there and the stakes are so high that it seems like an inevitability.
whatever many secrets are involved, information wants to be free and it's hard to believe that others won't figure it out.
by the time they do catch up we better be steps ahead. what's after EUV?
I worked on part of it in 2006-8. I noticed that our office waste wasn't being shredded, and asked my boss why not...
"With all the problems we have getting this to work? We ought to ship our drawings to our competitors to slow them down!"
Very tongue-in-cheek, but... yeah. The entire machine underwent a massive overhaul when it was discovered that bare, unoxidized titanium in the presence of elemental hydrogen would absorb so much it became brittle. Who knew? Maybe some few chemists, but none worked in ASML design, as it happened.
- ASML's High-NA EUV machines ready for high-volume production
- Machines have processed 500,000 wafers, showing technical readiness
- Full integration into manufacturing expected in 2-3 years, ASML's CTO says
After that, it may be X-rays.
A disruptive step would be to move to 3D printing, but that (among other issues) is too slow at the moment. Maybe, ideas from nano robotics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanorobotics) can help there.
> A disruptive step would be to move to 3D printing
The lithography equivalents of that are laser direct write lithography and e-beam lithography. They've been used for decades in research labs, but they're impossibly slow for any mass production.
Atomic Semi are trying to make some derivative of these processes happen at a commercial scale.
> i find it hard to believe that there is no equivalent anywhere else in the world. there is so much talent out there and the stakes are so high that it seems like an inevitability.
Well, even jet engine manufacturing is something that China is behind in (relatively speaking), and it (seems?) is simpler than some of the stuff in EUV machines.
Honestly I thought the same, but after watching a couple of videos on how EUV actually works, and what ASML (and the 1,200 other specialized companies that feed into its supply chain) built..
I can understand why you can't just take one apart and copy it.
There's (apparently) 4 decades of accumulated cutting edge scientific research that has gone into these machines.
I suspect the machinery, process and human expertise required to simply produce the parts required for these machines is the real moat (oh and I guess the US-led export controls too).
The build tolerances for components are incredible. There are 11 primary mirrors in an EUV machine, each one has something like 100 coats of ultra-pure materials that are precisely deposited in picometer-thick layers with tolerances in the nanometers, across a 1-meter wide curved surface.
Then you have to position the mirrors perfectly inside the machine, again with tolerances in the nanometers.
So even if you know what you need to do, having the equipment and expertise to do it is a different thing.
And that's just one part of the 100,000+ parts that make up an EUV machine.
That's the edge of what's possible, it's quite common even for researchers to have problems replicating results at the edge.
There's sometime implicit knowledge in a technique that either doesn't get written down, or someone is so good at something you don't think certain details will matter.
In my old lab (biochemistry) some people just have good hands and are really good at making something repeatable, others not so much.
The straregic importance is vastly over hyped. Maybe by people who want to sell chips. Actual physical feature size shrinkage rate has dramatically slowed from maybe a decade ago. making more efficient algorithms or architectures will beat out trying to fight physics.
A pack of cigarettes in the UK has a huge warning that smoking kills/causes cancer/etc with a shocking picture of a potential actual outcome, too. That's in addition to all the public campaigns about the risks of smoking.
The argument that smokers were victims who didn't know hasn't held any water for decades...
No, the addiction is irrelevant because you need to go over and ignore the anti-smoking campaigns and what's on the packs to become an addict in the first place. That's the point. It is a personal decision to start and it is a personal decision to continue (although it is of course not easy to stop once you are "addicted")
To start is a dumb decision one did at some point in the past. To continue is one that is no longer in your control once the addiction has taken hold.
It's not a personal decision to stay addicted. Let me tell you from experience. I wanted to stop. Yet, the cravings didn't let me until I had external forcing factors. Why should we deny other addicts that same help?
In the UK it is forbidden to smoke in public places and the revenue from taxes on cigarettes is several times what the healthcare service spends on smoking-related illnesses.
So I'd say things are already exactly as you wish.
Google is still around: revenue is at £8 billion (Office for Budget Responsibility) and in decline, and NHS spending is at £2.6 billion in England, which is by far the bulk of the UK (NHS England).
"In 2024, smoking cost the public finances in England £16.5bn, more than double the £6.8bn raised through tobacco taxes." [0]
"The NHS’s expenditure on smoking-related health issues remains high, corroborated by the reported £20. 6 billion cost to public finances in the UK in 2022, with approximately £2. 2 billion attributed to the NHS" [1]
It seems NHS spending is only a part of the story. Also note that I'm only quoting cost to public finances, the overall societal costs are cited as being much higher.
First, you corroborate that my data are indeed correct.
Second, I debunked the argument that illness treatment is paid by the tax payer, when indeed the data show that this is not the case as tax revenue far exceeds cost
Then, adding fuzzier and fuzzier unrelated things and add them up all equally as "costs" (like a very widely defined "economic cost", and peolple do not exist to maximise their labour output) to tilt the balance the other way is not an honest take, it is fudging the numbers to fit a narrative.
Frankly that fits the overall thinking on this topic and others: people cannot decide for themselves reharding their own lives, things must be banned, dissenting opinions are "wrong" and must suppressed. And we are back to exactly what the article is about!
Even if they don't die from a directly smoking-related cause, smokers experience more chronic illness than non-smokers, and it tends to start earlier in life. Non-NHS costs include sickness benefits, absences from work, and reduction in lifetime earnings. And then there are the opportunity costs from whatever else they might have spent the money and time on, not to mention what they might have achieved in life had they not developed emphysema in their early 40s.
It's certainly possible to argue about the exact figures, and ASH are hardly a neutral third-party. But it's more dishonest than not to pretend that they don't exist.
What cost is "loss of lifetime earnings" because you die early while still of working age? And cost to whom? (You're dead).
How can you add that like-for-like to actual financial cost to NHS? (Which was the otiginal issue of the discussion, remember?)
Shifting the topic and trying to add random things as "cost" is fudging the numbers, so dishoneest, indeed. It is obvious and I am hoping you see it, too.
Bottom line is that smokers do pay for the cost of their healthcare so this is a fair system and people can then make their own decisions regarding their own lives (which is what a free, liberal society is about).
Well, no, the cost of their own smoking-induced illness isn't the only cost, as mentioned before what about the healthcare costs of people who pick up 2nd or 3rd hand smoke?
I think the point we are making thay you don't want to acknowledge is that the cost to society, healthcare or otherwise, simply cannot be made up for with sin taxes on cigarettes. If we tried that, a pack would need to cost like 10x or more of what it does now, and even then it's debatable.
Unless we have finer data, I would assume that 2nd and 3rd hand smoke is included in "smoking-related" so in the cost figure. It has also to be much less than actual smoking so will not massively change the NHS cost.
We have already established that healthcare costs are more than covered by existing tax.
Arguing and trying to make up additional "costs" is, again, just fudging the numbers and clutching at straws at this point...
Extraordinary claims require evidence, not snarky Google mentions. Spending amounts are for what specifically? Do those 2.6 billion account for second and third hand smoke? For smoking in pregnancy leading to problems?
Most of the price of a pack of cigarettes in the UK is tax. It is fairly well known that revenue is higher than cost to healthcare service (NHS, which is funded via general taxation), and data are public and very easily found. My previous comment with data was indeed literally the result of two Google queries (revenue amd cost) and were from official sources, which I mentioned.
You don't like the data? Fine. You want to do your own detailed research and enlighten us? Fine. I didn't comment to be cross-examined to death...
I provided data although I commented that they were easily available because "what's your source" is the usual lazy retort.
This is hostile cross-examination, not discussion. I suggest you read the guidelines before saying things like "this is HN" (although you are right that this is a commom behaviour here).
> So I'd say things are already exactly as you wish.
Except, you know, the "don't take others with you" part.
That is a crucial, fundamental part of liberalism that people often skip over. Everyone only seems to remember the "I have the freedom to do whatever I want" part and skip over the "until that freedom impedes the freedom of others" part.
As a parent you can only get your children a smartphone when you decide they are old enough, and then iOS and Android have parental control down to app level.
Yes and decent countries ban social media, because like schools, the countries recognize this is a collective action issue. You get your children a smartphone when it becomes the only way they can connect with their peers. That's my point.
That's very different from schools banning use of phone during school hours. And, no, your role as parent is not to blindly follow the herd if you think it is not good. That's certainly true for smartphones and, again, there is parental control if/when you get your children a smartphone.
You can only bring a horse to water, as the saying goes...
My cynical take is that social media are a convenient tool for government to justify more identification and control. ID cards, digital IDs, age verification systems, lack of anonymity, etc almost literally justified by "just think of the children".
"your role as parent is not to blindly follow the herd if you think it is not good."
This is just conservative individual responsibility pablum just re-imagined for IT.
"It doesn't matter if all of societies forces + giant multi-national tech corporations are conspiring to trap your child, individual responsibility is all that matters"
This argument doesn't work for smoking or drinking, and it shouldn't for social media.
Wait, you jumping to national ID's are a tool for national control is fine, but me saying social media is forensically designed to be hyper-addictive[1] is somehow bizarre?
Perhaps an unpopular opinion but in large organisations you can pretty much always cut 10% of the workforce as a one off cut without noticeable negative impact.
Eurosam is a joint-venture between France and Italy so expected that France and Italy would have chosen it... Denmark becomes the first third-party customer.
Really, this is driven by France that has always worked to develop and keep an independent aerospace industry, including full range of missiles, although they have fallen behind a little and, unfortunately, dissolved a little within the EU.
For this sort of fast charging you need the charging station itself to have a large pool of batteries to buffer the energy from the grid and to push it at very high power to cars. Probably still requires a good size connection to the grid.
I think this is unavoidable for any sort of decent charging station from now on, anyway but does require significant investment in infrastructure.
Obviously, the engineers at BYD, CATL etc. are not stupid, so these fast chargers, which have been in production for several months and which are already installed in an increasing number of places, do include batteries, so they need only an averaged power from the electrical grid, not the up to 1 MW power that is provided to the charged vehicle.
BYD was the first company demonstrating such batteries and chargers, but CATL followed after a short time. While the times reported by CATL are slightly longer than for BYD at room temperature, these CATL batteries have faster charging at low temperatures.
It is nice to see healthy competition between the major Chinese battery producers. Unfortunately, there is much less competition for them from other countries.
The electrical grid infrastructure that is needed does not depend on the charging speed, but it is determined by the number of cars that are charged per day at a given location (and their average battery capacity).
If you google it, revenue is at £8 billion (Office for Budget Responsibility) and in decline, and NHS spending is at £2.6 billion in England, so the bulk of it (NHS England).
I do not have the specific info/ref to hand, but at one point some years ago, smoking brought in something of the order of nine times as much into the NHS as it spent on smoking related illnesses. I was very surprised by this.
Even so, the NHS's goals are rightly such that greatly reducing the harm done by smoking is preferred over keeping this revenue. Unlike a tobacco company that would not factor harms external to the organisation into the profit and loss calculation.
reply